Yesterday I noticed that my EPN sites were having trouble with their searching capability. It appears that eBay changed some things related to their RSS feed on my searches, luckily my category RSS were okay, for the time being. This recent change affected my parser that extracts the Auction ID for my SEO links (internalized links to eBay). I also noticed that they named a few new variables (this could be old news for many, but it was new to me)

icep_item=xxxxxx
ipn=psmain
icp_vectorid=xxxxxxx
kwid=xxxxxx
mtid=xxxx
kw=rss
icep_ff3=2

I was able to restore search functionality, but I only updated my rover redirects on one site to verify that this change did NOT impact my click counts for that site, and I’ll be migrating my rover code to this new style. I know I could pull this rover URL directly from the RSS result, but I’m not passing extraneous info via the querystring on my redirect. I may reconsider this though.

Today, Dave at BuildANicheStoreBlog.com had a post stating that if you have BANS sites that have Cloak Affiliate Links in box #4 you may be experiencing problems. This seems awfully coincidental to my issues noticed yesterday. Apparently, those users are directed to a ‘Page Not Responding’ at eBay. You can read Dave’s full post here.

Related posts:

1. EPN change to RSS
2. EPN Newsletter – Referring URL Visibilty
3. EPN Tracking Image

So I just received a new EPN newsletter, and the first item displayed is regarding referring URL visibility. Here is a what they said:

We believe that transparency of referring URLs is vital to assessing traffic’s quality. For example, if an advertiser books outdoor billboards, they see where those ads appear and we believe the same should be true of Affiliate Marketing! It is therefore important to make sure your websites or tools are sending accurate referring URLs to eBay when traffic is passed through affiliate links. If we notice a high percentage of your traffic is not showing referring URLs, we will need you to resolve this as only a small percentage should be blocked by browsers. Soon we’ll be posting a series of tips on the blog that can help ensure your referring urls are being passed to our system.

This is a little troubling since I’ve been redirecting EPN clicks back to my website and then directing those clicks to EPN via PHP’s header() function. This makes all of my links appear that they’re all links within my site.

I’ll be doing some tests today to see how I can provide them with referrer info while maintaining my current system on EPN storefronts.

Related posts:

1. EPN – Code of Conduct updates
2. Pay Attention to your Roll-Your-Own EPN sites
3. URL Masking (cloaking)

So you may have come across the term of cloaking URLs, this usually sounds evil and bad, like cloaked pages, which is something entirely different. Cloaking pages is presenting pages based on certain conditions, usually presenting a specific page to Google, for example. Doing this will get you banned and removed from Google’s index. Not good. Cloaking URLs is a slightly different concept. It’s showing a URL that usually points to something in your own domain. Once you click on the link you’ll be redirected to the ‘real’ destination URL.

For example a CJ link for eBay would look like this:

http://rover.ebay.com/rover/1/711-1751-2978-328/1?aid=10366506&pid=123456

But to cloak it you would make it look like this:

http://www.money-code.com/ebay

For this example we’ll use Apache’s module called mod_rewrite. Almost all installs of Apache have this installed, but some may not, so you’ll need to verify this. Also, this will need to be managed via a .htaccess file. This is another option that might not be available for you. Sometimes, some hosts will not give you the ability to manage mod_rewrite directives within .htaccess, so you’ll need to check here as well.

Simply create a file called .htaccess in the root of your site. Next we need to add our rewrite rule and action. Rewrite uses regular expressions, so you can get pretty tricky if you want, this example will be as simple as it can get.

Basically, we’re turned on the ‘engine’. Our rule is ebay$ which means after the site name (www.money-code.com/) it’ll look for ebay and has to end at ebay. Meaning if we did this:
http://www.money-code.com/ebay/ it won’t work… only http://www.money-code.com/ebay

Another directive you may need depending on your set up is RewriteBase, this primarily is used if you have your applicaiton in a subdirectory to start with, etc.

If you’re not familiar with regular expressions, you should stop now and buy this book (Mastering Regular Expressions). RegEx will come in handy in the future! I basically can’t go a day without using some form of RegEx.

The second part of the line is a redirect destination. There are some flags at the end [QSA,L] which is [Q]uery [S]tring [A]ppend, [L]ast. We want to append any querystring data, and we want to close with this being the last rule.

Now, we’re not done. We need to do a few other things. Our anchor link will need the following attribute

This tells the robots that items at the end of this destination is not relevant to the site and to not follow. Unfortunately, spiders will still follow this, but we have one more simple technique. We drop a robots.txt file in the root and add the following:

Now, ‘good’ robots will pay attention to that and not follow the link.

Another option is to use PHP. You could create a link to point to the following:

http://www.money-code.com/ebay.php

ebay.php would contain the following code:

This accomplishes the same thing, but at the code level vs. server directive.

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Related posts:

1. EPN Newsletter – Referring URL Visibilty
2. Pay Attention to your Roll-Your-Own EPN sites
3. Tracking converting keywords from your PPC campaigns